By using Twitter Cards
If your main aim of using twitter is to get potential customers from twitter to buy something, read something or download something from your website then twitter cards are definitely for you! Twitter Cards are a way of adding photos, videos and media experience to Tweets, in addition to the 140 characters your allowed, that drive traffic to your website.
This article concentrates on showing you what twitter cards are, where to find them and how to technically implement twitter cards on your website – writing good marketing hooks are for another day 😉
Still not sure what we mean, that’s ok, let us show you first where you find them. On a PC browser a twitter card is available on your tweet if there is a View media link on the bottom right of the tweet – see example above. On your phone you just click on the tweet and the card will appear if one exists.
Whew, great your still with me. Want to know what they look like when you open the card – see example of card just under the tweet below:
Now we know how to find them. Let me tell you that there are 3 main types of twitters cards, lets go through them quickly so you can see which ones are relevant for your business.
1Summary Twitter Card
Great for articles or products, gives you the featured image of an article and the few lines as a teaser for you to get your customers to find out more information on your website. In the example below you can see the Summary Card of Irish Tech News article linking to the IrishTechNews.net website. You can customize this card by having a larger image or a gallery of images. As you can see the card is in addition to your 140 characters. It’s kind of cool the way it works wait till you see the other types..
2App Twitter Card
The App Card is a great way to increase installs of your mobile apps. Here is an example of what the Inc60 app twitter card looks like.
On your mobile it will bring you straight to the right App Store to download the app, reviews and the app store name appear on the twitter card – see below:
3Player Twitter Card
This is so your followers can watch video clips or listen to audio streams on twitter without being brought to another website. We find this useful especially for our podcasts, we can stream them directly on twitter to our twitter followers. It’s handy for videos if you host them e.g. on youTube people can play them directly from youTube in their twitter feed. You still get the watch credits from the youTube site so your statistics are intact!
How do I get twitter cards to appear when I tweet?
Ok so great, you like them and want to use them what do you do next. Firstly all of the information to create twitter cards is hidden behind the pages of your website. Once you cut and paste the web link of the page e.g. https://inc60.com/business-podcasts/ into twitter tweet has every thing it needs. The web page tells twitter what type of card to show: Summary, Player or App from above and gives it all the links and text it needs. Try it here maybe your website already has twitter cards set-up. Just paste a link in and preview the card.
https://cards-dev.twitter.com/validator
If you have absolutely no clue about how your website works now is probably a good time to ask your developer how much would it be to support twitter cards and get them to do it for you. Send this link to them (https://dev.twitter.com/cards/getting-started).
If you know your way around wordpress it’s actually quite simple to set-up let me show you how to set it up and use it. Yoast is a plugin that most people use it does not support all the different twitter card types only summary. So if your happy with just summary and you have yoast installed your good to paste you URL into twitter and you should get a summary card. You can test it using the twitter card validator to make sure it’s set-up ok for you.
If you would like to use all the different card types you can install a plugin called JM Twitter Cards using the following steps.
- Back up your website or ask your hosting company do they have backups before you proceed.
- Login – Dashboard – Plugins – Add New
- Search for JM Twitter Cards, Click Install
- Then activate it.
- Go to Dashboard- JM Twitter Cards – JM Twitter Cards
Any problems with the plugin here is a link to the official support
Settings
- Fill in all the relevant information in post types Options tab, if you don’t have an app don’t worry just leave the fields blank.
- Click on the Post Types tab and make sure you have posts selected.
Ok so lets take a Player Twitter Card as an example – We are going to edit a post that we want a youTube video to show up in the player card.
- Go to wordpress dashboard->posts
- Edit a post you want to add the Player Card too and scroll down to the bottom of the post, you will see a section called Twitter Cards.
- Select player as the card type in the drop down.
- Paste in the youTube/vimeo URL of the video you would like to show
- We have a featured image as the player cover so we do not need to fill in any other fields, that it done.
- Save it.
Check Player Twitter Card works
- Copy the website post link and paste it into Twitter Validator .
- Click on Preview Card.
Note: You may need to get your website white listed with your twitter account, it will prompt if you need too, just follow the steps.
Success, Great! Now your good to go just paste the same post url link into any tweet it will automatically put a Player Twitter Card in your tweet. You can set up any of your posts or pages in your wordpress site to have different Twitter cards.
You can absolutely have twitter cards on any website we only took the example of how to do it on wordpress as it’s the most used CMS. Best of luck with your twitter cards don’t forget to tell us about them on twitter @incSixty .
Read this twitter cards article on Inc60, I found it useful for my business, you might too Click To Tweet
